A week ago we shared a status update on the Nouveau driver to clarify an earlier posting that the Nouveau driver is not dead. In the past few days though the Nouveau Wiki Feature Matrix was updated to reflect the latest changes in this open-source, third-party NVIDIA graphics driver. According to the feature matrix, RandR 1.2, NouveauFB, X Render, and Suspend in a KMS environment is now supported across the spectrum of NVIDIA GPUs that are implemented within this driver: the NV04/05, NV10, NV20, NV30, NV40, and NV50 series...

AWESOME! just need the 3d textures now and dual link dvi for my desktop to convert to nouveau! My laptop just needs texture support. TV-out isn't that important if I can use dualhead to output to a HDTV!

10-18-2009, 05:36 AM

mar04

And I'm waiting for powersaving

10-18-2009, 08:18 AM

Deagleson

So would this mean that it will work on my old Nvidia FX 5600?
Its powered by a old AMD Athlon XP 2600 and 1.5gb ram.

10-18-2009, 08:48 AM

rohcQaH

Quote:

Originally Posted by DMJC

My laptop just needs texture support.

and powersaving. I wouldn't try to run a laptop GPU without it. At best it gets noisy, at worst it'll overheat and get damaged (if your GPU is affected by the bumpgate defects).

10-18-2009, 10:07 AM

RahulSundaram

Nouveau is getting rapid improvements

Quote:

Originally Posted by DMJC

AWESOME! just need the 3d textures now and dual link dvi for my desktop to convert to nouveau! My laptop just needs texture support. TV-out isn't that important if I can use dualhead to output to a HDTV!

Red Hat's Ben Skeggs is working full time on the Nouveau driver and he is making rapid progress. Fedora 11 already has replaced Nv driver (Nvidia written obfuscated code) with Nouveau by default. In Fedora 12 (Beta coming up shortly), you will already see a lot more features. 3D support is work in progress but bound to happen soon. Patience!

10-18-2009, 10:38 AM

89c51

i wonder how they are going to pull it off without documentation from NVIDIA

it took about a year to get to something usable with ATI cards and the devs had documents

seems pointless

i still cannot find any reason why someone should buy an Nvidia card if he wants to use only open source software :confused:

10-18-2009, 12:55 PM

stikonas

Quote:

Originally Posted by 89c51

i wonder how they are going to pull it off without documentation from NVIDIA

it took about a year to get to something usable with ATI cards and the devs had documents

seems pointless

i still cannot find any reason why someone should buy an Nvidia card if he wants to use only open source software :confused:

Yes, it took a year for AMD cards, but it has already taken much longer for nouveau and it still lags behind, So it is true that progress without documentation is slower, but it is still possible to do something without docs as was shown by nouveau team and previously by r300 reverse engineering project.

Also, Gallium3D is easier to program for compared to classic Mesa so nouveau devs had some advantage here compared to r600 devs. C.f. r300g was started much later than nouveau, and it is almost finished.

10-18-2009, 11:35 PM

RahulSundaram

Progress without documentation

Quote:

Originally Posted by 89c51

i wonder how they are going to pull it off without documentation from NVIDIA

it took about a year to get to something usable with ATI cards and the devs had documents

seems pointless

i still cannot find any reason why someone should buy an Nvidia card if he wants to use only open source software :confused:

When users buy hardware, they don't necessarily but it with Linux in mind. Also, Nouveau is already way more advanced that the Nv driver it replaces. To give you an idea of a similar thing, think about Pidgin. Pretty much all the protocols it supports has been reverse engineered without any documentation. Ideally you would only be using things like Jabber/XMPP but in the real world but support for all those proprietary protocols in Pidgin has of course enormously benefited us. So has support for proprietary protocol in Samba and a proprietary documentation format in OpenOffice.org. Nouveau is very similar. The combined support of Intel and ATI with documentation and code along with the pressure of a reverse engineered driver getting more and more features will hopefully get Nvidia to change their minds. There are many good examples of this. Java going GPL is a recent case.

10-19-2009, 12:50 AM

nightmorph

I just hope it'll support GeForce 8200 GPUs, like the one built into my motherboard, an Asus M3N78-VM. I use a RadeonHD 4550 with the latest git driver stack, but I'd be willing to try Nouveau if it supported my hardware.\

That was one reason why I bought the ATI card in the first place: xf86-video-ati never had issues with it. At the time I got the motherboard, Nouveau didn't support 8xxx chips at all, same for nv, and the binary nvidia-drivers were unusable, they ran so poorly. ATI saved the day.